East City

1913


Edward Elric gobbled down his lunch with relish, the food hardly touching the sides on its way down. His younger brother, Alphonse, sat across from him at the small wickerwood table, his hands folded neatly on his lap, making small talk whenever Brother deigned to stop for breath.

The waitress –– Al thought she looked a little like Winry, with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair tied in a ribbon –– had asked the younger Elric several times if he would be dining with his brother. The answer was always the same.

"I'll share," Al said. Ed just grunted through a mouthful of dumpling.

"Alright, but I'll have to add a gratuity to the meal."

"That's fine!" Al interjected, before Ed could protest.

But Al never picked at any of Ed's food. He simply watched, as though watching his older brother would somehow fill the hollowness in his stomach where pangs of hunger ought to be.

Alphonse Elric hadn't eaten a scrap of food in three years, five months, and sixteen days.

His last meal had been a thin, tepid soup, the color and consistency of used dishwater, hastily cobbled together by Edward before the brothers attempted to resurrect their mother using human transmutation, the ultimate interdiction amongst alchemists.

Al remembered Teacher telling them that cooking is just alchemy with a saucepan, a deconstruction and reconstruction of raw materials using heat and energy just like any other transmutational science. But the shared chemistries had never really crossed over for Edward. Brother was a terrible cook. Alphonse's last meal –– the gray broth with bits of what someone could only generously call vegetables floating around in it –– had tasted revolting.

And Alphonse missed it more than he had words for.

He missed the smell of manure in his hometown of Resembool just as much as he missed the sweet waft of hay baking in the afternoon sun. He missed the taste of stale milk and sweet cream alike. He wanted to burn his tongue drinking cocoa again. He wanted to stub his toes on table legs and get chills in the snow. Sometimes, when he wrapped his hands around tangles of barbed wire or stopped an enemy's knife from putting a hole in his brother, he wished his fingers would bleed.

When Ed came back from fights bruised and battered, Alphonse wished he could take some of Brother's pain.

So Al was pleased Ed tucked into his meals with such enthusiasm. It meant he still appreciated it.

"A penny for 'em, Al?"

Alphonse started, the folded sheets of his armor clanking together. Ed's mouth was so full of pork bun that Al almost didn't catch the words.

"Oh. It's nothing, Brother." Voicing his thoughts would make Ed feel guilty, and probably deprive him of his appetite, and Al didn't want that. The only thing worse than ruminating on the sensory deprivation of his armored body was knowing that Brother felt responsible for it.

Instead, Al deftly changed the subject: "I was just thinking how it's the third time this week you've avoided the Colonel's summons by going out to lunch."

Ed's expression curdled. He stabbed a pork bun with a chopstick. "I may be a dog of the military, but I don't heel at anyone's beck and call. Colonel Matchstick doesn't summon me anywhere."

"You know what I mean. You're in the army now, Brother. You can't just keep ignoring him. You'll get in trouble."

"Like I care," Ed retorted spikily. "Besides, if I have to sit through him griping about everything besides the kitchen sink, then I'm gonna need the energy."

"You ate 20 minutes ago!"

"So?" Ed stuffed another pork bun into his mouth, until it bulged from his cheek like a hamster. "I'm a growing kid."

Al knew better than to dignify that with a response. Edward Elric was the youngest state alchemist in history, edging out his superior officer, Colonel Roy Mustang, by almost a decade. He had taken on rogue alchemists and power-hungry government officials. He had attempted human transmutation, survived the subsequent Rebound, and bonded a soul to a suit of armor. He was probably the bravest, most resilient person Al knew. And yet, despite all that, nothing could make Brother foam at the mouth quite like a pass about his height, or rather, his distinct lack of it.

And the last thing Al wanted to do on a peaceful afternoon was disturb the other patrons at the corner cafe with one of Edward's outbursts.

Save that for the Colonel's office, thought Al.

"What was the summons about?" he asked benignly, mindful of raising his brother's hackles too much, but curious despite himself. Though he wasn't in the military himself, and suspected Roy Mustang played his secrets a little too close to the chest, Alphonse was fond of the bombastic Flame Alchemist and his team, and found most of their dealings in East City intriguing.

When those dealings didn't involve near-death scrapes for Alphonse and his older brother, of course.

Ed shrugged noncommittally, wrenching Al back to the present. "Eh, just a phone call about some old caretaker lady or whatever having issues up at her employer's house. Needed an alchemist's help. Didn't think it was worth a run-in with the Colonel."

"I don't think that's for you to decide, Brother. She might be in trouble."

"And since when do state alchemists make house-calls? Don't worry about it, Al. It's probably just the Colonel trying to rope me into doing something that would take him five minutes if he bothered to do any work himself for once, instead of pawning it off on Hawkeye… or us."

"The Colonel does a lot of work!"

"Calculating the tip on his dinner dates doesn't count."

"That's a bit unfair."

"So is having to listen to him brag about it! He's worse than Lieutenant-Colonel Hughes."

Al sighed. Colonel Mustang had an ego at least as big as Brother's, and verbally spared with Ed so frequently it had almost become routine, but the Flame Alchemist had afforded the Elrics every kindness since their move from Resembool. Despite his reputation as a philanderer and a slacker, Al trusted the Colonel had the brothers' best interests at heart.

But it would take a constitution stronger than Alphonse's to convince Brother of that. So far as Ed was concerned, Colonel Roy Mustang was self-absorbed, arrogant, and the embodiment of every bureaucratic hindrance that came with being in the military.

Fullmetal and Flame, like oxygen and sulfur, mused Alphonse, almost fondly: so similar in their composition, but combined in the right quantities, they tended to make sulfuric acid.

As Ed ordered dessert, Al drank in the noise and color of East City. The cafe bookended a row of narrow rent houses and open-air storefronts, bright awnings fanning over the road. The street was a narrow, cobblestone affair, wide enough for pedestrian traffic but too small for anything larger than a horse-drawn cart. Even Alphonse had had difficult inserting himself into the throng without hitting someone with his pauldrons. Al never felt more hulking and unwieldy than when he was navigating the narrow, labyrinthine streets of East City, trying to keep pace with Edward as the tiny alchemist moved expertly through the crowds.

So, when a black sedan turned onto the street and began to inch through the crowd, parking parallel to the cafe and making everyone within a twelve foot radius grumble something uncomplimentary about the Amestrian government, Alphonse was just as surprised as the rest of the townspeople.

Ed's chopsticks froze midway to his mouth. He glared daggers with his butterscotch eyes.

"Fullmetal."

A man with black hair and even blacker eyes poked his head out of the passenger window. He glanced at the food on Ed's plate. "Oh good, you bought lunch. Get it packed up, I'll eat it on the way over."

Edward Elric snapped his chopstick in half.

Colonel Roy Mustang looked amused, smirking in that familiar way of his –– which often came at Brother's expense, realized Alphonse.

"Boys."

The driver's seat window rolled down to reveal a slim, severe woman with amber eyes and blond hair pulled into a tight knot: Lieutenant Hawkeye, the Colonel's right-hand man.

More like babysitter, Brother would argue.

Takes one to know one, Al wanted to say, but never did.

"Lieutenant. Colonel." Alphonse nodded to each of the officers in turn.

"Hey Lieutenant," muttered Ed. He didn't bother to acknowledge the Colonel before Al planted an elbow in his brother's ribs.

"Ow! What the hell, Al––"

"Brother." A quiet warning.

Ed's glare changed from indignant to loathsome as he turned from Al to Mustang, finally mustering a reluctant, "What do you want, Colonel?"

"Good afternoon to you too, Fullmetal." Mustang jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "Get in; we're late."

"To what?"

Mustang's face twitched. His genial expression looked suddenly very strained. "To the thing I specifically warned you not to be late for."

Ed blinked. "Huh?"

Al leaned in close before Colonel Mustang went apoplectic. "The old woman, Brother. She needed an alchemist's help, remember?"

"Oh. That." Edward crossed his arms. His garnish red cloak muffled the sound of his automail joints. He speared his last pork bun and swallowed it.

"Are you all finished here," asked the pretty waitress, appearing suddenly at Edward's shoulder, beaming.

Brother didn't break eye contact with his commanding officer when he said, "Yeah. And you can put it on the tab of Colonel Roy Mustang at Eastern Command."

"Sure thing… and can I see some form of identi––"

Edward flashed his pocket watch.

"Oh. Well, that's aright then!"

The waitress cleared the plates. Mustang's black eyes narrowed on Edward. Alphonse gave the Lieutenant a quick nod before the two state alchemists starting shouting at one another in the middle of the street.

Hawkeye jumped out of the driver's seat, opening the door for her commanding officer. Mustang switched to riding shotgun, leaving Ed to squeeze in beside Alphonse in the backseat. Once everyone was settled –– with Ed pressed against the window and Al's knees digging into Colonel Mustang's backrest, the chassis of the car groaning in protest under the armor's weight –– Hawkeye steered them expertly through the market crowd.

Edward drummed his fingers on his knee, his automail hand rattling like a chainlink fence. "So what's this all about, huh?"

It was Hawkeye who answered because, Al suspected, Mustang was dangerously close to losing his temper.

"What do you know of the name Osterhagen, Edward?" she asked.

Brother arched an eyebrow; the question had surprised him. "Just some basic stuff Teacher taught us when we were learning alchemy. It's the name of a chemical reaction. The Osterhagen method is a way of creating ballistic-like propellant using nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose, and acetone as a solvent." His face turned downcast and shadowed. "The chemical compounds produced by the Osterhagen method are used by the military in field guns."

Hawkeye nodded. It suddenly made sense to Alphonse why it was the Lieutenant giving the briefing and not the Colonel; no one knew guns quite like Hawkeye. She continued, "The Osterhagen method was developed by a man named Tyburn Osterhagen as a means of phasing out traditional gunpowder weapons at the advent of the Ishvalan Civil War. The Osterhagen propellant used in shrapnel rounds and cartridges made Amestrian weapons much less prone to explosions, safer for the soldiers shooting them. "

Mustang picked up: "Tyburn died before he saw the fruits of his labor. But Tyburn's son, Neumann, and his wife, Maria, became very wealthy once Führer Bradley officially bestowed the Osterhagens with a contract to supply the Amestrian military with weapons. The Osterhagens essentially monopolized the munitions trade during the Ishavalan War."

"They're war profiteers," said Ed darkly.

Alponse agreed. "They make money off the suffering of other people."

"So why should we care about this family, exactly?"

The two soldiers hesitated. Both Alphonse and Edward waited for an answer.

"The Osterhagens are dead," said Hawkeye bluntly, before Mustang had a chance to open his mouth, Al noted. The younger Elric figured the Lieutenant could handle the difficult details with a lot more grace than her commanding officer.

Brother looked less caustic all of a sudden. "What happened?"

"Isaac McDougal happened," said Mustang, his words biting like acid. Alphonse flinched, remembering the battle a few weeks earlier, during which both Elrics had felt more than a little surplus to requirement. "The Freezer took out several Central City blocks before the Führer subdued him. Maria and Neumann, along with their young son, William, were in a townhouse near Central Command when McDougal's ice walls reduced it to rubble."

"You said Maria and Neumann were killed," murmured Alphonse, "but what about the son? William?"

Mustang turned to look out the front windshield. Al thought he caught a glimpse of Hawkeye turning towards her commanding officer, their eyes meeting briefly in their reflections.

"You'll see," the Flame Alchemist finally said. Hawkeye's attention went back to her driving.

"So, is this what we're doing now, Colonel?" asked Ed quietly. "We're making house-calls?"

"Not at all," said Mustang as Hawkeye took a small road out of East City, "we're paying a visit to an old friend.

"And settling a debt while we're at it."